Several people killed in US school shooting, AFP reports

• Police said a shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Ore., on Thursday left “multiple victims.” The suspect is dead.
• Officers arrived about two minutes after being alerted, and the suspect was reported down seconds later.
• Police said it was unclear who shot the suspect and that it may have been a bystander.

 A gunman opened fire at an elementary school in central Oregon on Thursday afternoon, leaving multiple people wounded or dead before the suspect himself was killed, the police said.

Officers were alerted to a “critical scene” at Silver Rail Elementary School at about 1 p.m. local time and reached the campus about two minutes later, said Sheila Miller, a spokeswoman for the Bend Police Department. “Seconds later, we received word over the radio that the suspect in this incident was down,” she said.

Ms. Miller told reporters at a news conference that investigators had not determined who shot the suspect. “It may have been a bystander,” she said. “At this time, we have multiple victims.”

Emergency medical workers took at least two people to a local hospital, she said, adding, “we do not know their status.” Authorities did not immediately release the suspect’s identity, a possible motive, or a count of the dead and wounded.

The Bend-La Pine School District said on social media that the school, which serves students from kindergarten through fifth grade, was placed under lockdown. In a later update, the district said law enforcement officers were escorting students onto buses to a separate location, where parents could be reunited with their children.

Bend, a city of high-desert terrain and a popular outdoor-recreation destination, is more than 100 miles southeast of Portland.

A familiar pattern of violence

The shooting added another name to the long list of American schools touched by gun violence. The United States, where firearms are widely available, has the highest rate of gun-related deaths among developed nations, with thousands of people killed each year.

The deadliest school shooting in the country’s history occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho, a student, killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before taking his own life.

Oregon has its own history of such violence. In 1998, a 15-year-old opened fire at Thurston High School in Springfield, killing two students; he had killed his parents the day before. In 2015, a gunman killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg.

The Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, has recorded more than 360 such incidents in the United States this year.

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